Straight Talk from Steve

By now many of you have heard about the new sex education standards being proposed to the Nebraska Department of Education.

These new standards would teach children as young as five years-old about gender identity and same gender families.

These new standards are not the result of any piece of legislation in the Unicameral. Instead, the 60 page draft of proposed changes to the State’s health education curriculum came from a team of so called “education experts,” otherwise known as LGBTQ activists.

This team of education experts never bothered to survey the general public or to measure the pulse of Nebraska before imposing these kinds of progressive standards on our educational system. Had they done so, and actually cared about the results, they never would have drafted such a controversial proposal.

The nature of the sex education portion of these new health education standards is divisive at best. To be sure, divisiveness is exactly what these education experts were aiming for. To the contrary, the primary goal of a committee or team of this kind should have been to find common ground. Instead, their proposal imposes a radical left-wing agenda upon a very large traditionalist segment of our society, who reject the ideas contained in the proposal.

Just to be clear, I oppose the human growth and development section of these new health education standards. These are standards which encourage children to question their own sexual orientation and which promote several categories of gender identities as a matter of self-expression as opposed to teaching children to accept their own God-given biological sex.

The primary duty for educating children resides with parents, not the State. Although the State of Nebraska has a constitutional obligation to “provide for the free instruction in the common schools,” that obligation does not usurp the fundamental right of parents to raise their children as they see fit.

The proper role of public education is to assist parents in the task of educating their children. When educators view their role this way, they no longer seek to override the desires and convictions of parents with their own ulterior agenda. Unfortunately, far too many educators view themselves as experts charged with the primary task of educating children regardless of the beliefs, desires and convictions of parents.

The State of Nebraska has no moral obligation to teach sexuality to children, and teaching sexuality to children may very well be out of bounds.

We must never forget that it is a fundamental characteristic of communist countries to take children from their parents at an early age and indoctrinate them with propaganda which runs contrary to the convictions of their parents. This kind of educational Statism has no place in a free country.

Because parents bear the primary responsibility for educating their children and because parents in general remain divided on these kinds of sexuality issues, common sense would suggest that we should either leave the human growth and development section of the curriculum unchanged or just abolish it altogether.